Felix devastates Nicaragua

Hurricane Felix has killed at least 38 people on Nicaragua's
Caribbean coast and more than 80 people are missing after the storm
destroyed thousands of flimsy homes, the government says.

As soldiers combed the area around Puerto Cabezas port, the Navy
tried to reach settlements on marshy spits of land or on keys to
look for more casualties from Felix, which crashed into the coast
on Tuesday as an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane.

"There are a lot of missing people, we don't know, there could
be more or less 80 people," he said.

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People wept at the harbor in Puerto Cabezas, inhabited mostly by
Miskito Indians, for 12 fishermen they said never returned from
work.

Visiting the area, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said about
9,000 homes in the area were destroyed. Residents worked with
police and soldiers to try to clear dozens of uprooted trees lying
in the street.

"We are talking about really serious damage," Ortega said.

Felix revived memories throughout Central America of Hurricane
Mitch, which killed 10,000 people in 1998.

The latest storm weakened to a tropical depression after
entering Honduras on Tuesday and residents of the capital,
Tegucigalpa, appeared to escape major damage this time around.

Only drizzle fell in Tegucigalpa, which flooded when Mitch
rampaged through, but heavy rain in the north of the country
flooded villages and left two rivers close to bursting their
banks.

There were no reports of deaths in Honduras.

Felix came on the heels of another Category 5 hurricane, the
most powerful type of storm. Last month, Hurricane Dean killed 27
people in the Caribbean and Mexico last month.

It was the first time on record that two Atlantic hurricanes
made landfall as Category 5 storms in one season.

In the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Henriette, a Category 1 storm,
hit mainland Mexico after lashing the Los Cabos resort on Tuesday
before roaring through the Gulf of California.

A foreign tourist walking on the beach in Los Cabos, on the Baja
California peninsula, was killed on Monday after being dragged away
by big waves as the storm approached.

Coffee producers in Nicaragua and Honduras did not report damage
to the crop, vital to the two countries' economies.